Sunday, November 22, 2009

100 Mile Thanksgiving-and Other Local Food Accomplishments on 'With Good Reason'

Yesterday's Broadcast of the local Public Radio program 'With Good Reason' was dedicated to fascinating and inspiring work being done in the area of local food in Virginia. The first piece follows the story of UVA professor, Tim Beatly and the 100 mile Thanksgiving that he and his students accomplished.
Two years ago I convinced my mother-in-law to make our multi-family Thanksgiving dinner a 100 percent all local Thanksgiving dinner. Okay, so in the end there were perhaps a couple things... (think olive oil and salt) that weren't local, but mostly it was an amazing success. I even went so far as to read what I had hoped was an inspiring passage from Barbara Kingsolver on the beauty and meaning within an all local Thanksgiving. We benefited from having family my in-laws had to visit in New Jersey during peak cranberry season. They brought a bunch back with them. I saved blueberries from spring, found local pecans, roasted and pureed my farmer's market pumpkin for the pies. We had everything including seafood, a heritage breed turkey, wine, my father-in-laws homebrew, and a cornbread stuffing using cornmeal from the Ashland mill. Two years ago it was harder to get stuff this late in the season and we were all impressed by the bounty that lay before us that night. Since then we've relaxed the rules to suit the larger family, but a large part of the meal remains local.
The story of Tim Beatly and his student's is filled with useful information and plenty of "food for thought," and his is just one of four stories from yesterday's broadcast. Listen to the broadcast Here.

No comments:

Post a Comment